Five boys and two girls showed up for after school chess club at Strickland Middle School today. I taught how the mobility of the chessmen relates to their point values. In other words, how is it decided that a pawn is 1 point, a knight is 3 points, and so forth? Students calculated the mobility of every chessman from the corner and from the center and drew conclusions.

We also solved positions which highlighted how many attackers and defenders are focused on a certain square. For each position, students had to decide if capturing was a good idea. Then students played each other a chess game where they tracked how many points each side captured. All of this was to make us more aware that trading a queen for a knight (or a rook for bishop) is not usually a good idea. Next week (April 27) is the last day of chess club, to be followed by our Denton ISD middle school chess tournament on May first.